The present inventions are related to systems and methods for processing data, and more particularly to systems and methods for detecting data sequences.
A typical data processing system receives an analog input signal that is sampled to yield a series of digital samples. The data often includes sequences of data used for data synchronization and/or other purposes. Various existing data processing systems utilize, for example, a Viterbi sequence detection circuit. Such a circuit operates well where the received digital samples of the analog input signal are accurately equalized to a target response and accurate timing and gain control are applied. In some cases, sufficient accuracy is hard to achieve resulting in degraded performance of the sequence detection. Other approaches rely on threshold detection processes that work reasonably well in low noise environments, but as channel bit densities increase the effects of noise increase rendering such threshold approaches less effective.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for data sequence detection.